Christopher Middleton – the First Royal Navy Arctic Explorer – Crosses the Line in 1742

  1. A detailed summary of the Constantine Phipps Expedition can be found at Ann Savours Shirley “A very interesting point in geography”: The 1773 Phipps Expedition towards the North Pole Arctic Journal 37:4 (December 1984) 402-428. https://pubs.aina.ucalgary.ca/arctic/Arctic37-4-402.pdf . Of direct relevance to this post, Savours Shirley is the only historian I have found who referred to the 1741-42 Expedition as a “Naval voyage to the Arctic.” (407). For this she cites both E.E. Rich’s Hudson’s Bay Company, 1670-1870 Vol. 1 1670-1763 (London: The Hudson’s Bay Record Society, 1958) and Glyndwr Williams’ The British Search for the Northwest Passage in the Eighteenth Century (London: Longman’s, 1962). Neither of these authors describe Middleton’s expedition in these terms in these works. Savours Shirley herself, in her later book, The Search for the North-West Passage, (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1999) also didn’t describe it as an Arctic expedition. ↩︎
  2. Christopher Middleton’s 1741-1742 Expedition is little known today, even for mapping important extents of Hudson’s Bay. It was a very early example of a wider program of naval exploration, falling in between the scientific missions of the English Navy – Edmond Halley’s magnetic studies of 1698-1701 and William Dampier’s 1699-1701 Roebuck expedition – and John Byron and Samuel Wallis’ HMS Dolphin circumnavigations of 1764-66. It would be accurate to say that Middleton’s exploration has little place in Canadian history or the history of exploration, though his expedition ought to stand out even as a precedent for later exploration missions that penetrated the Arctic Archipelago. See for example the Canadian Encyclopedia’s entry: https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/arctic-exploration. For a nice primer on the eighteenth century searches, see Annie O’Brien’s ARGO article on the NW Passage: The Northwest Passage – American Revolutionary Geographies Online ↩︎
  3. Glyn Williams Arctic Labyrinth : The Quest for the Northwest Passage (Toronto: Viking 2009) P101. ↩︎
  4. For the purposes of this post, the English Navy is determined to have become the “Royal Navy” upon the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II, in 1660, while any reference to Great Britain instead of England refers to the polity that was brought into existence by the 1707 Act of Union between England and Scotland. There were earlier English explorers, and at least one earlier English naval ship employed on Arctic exploration: Sir Martin Frobisher’s ship Aid (or Ayde, built 1562), which accompanied him on his last two expeditions to Baffin Island/Frobisher Bay. This post argues that Middleton’s Expedition is the first [British] Royal Navy Arctic exploration mission. ↩︎
  5. For a detailed account of HMS Furnace’s modification for this mission, including Middleton’s own personal input on modifications, see our post on HMS Furnace’s remarkable transformation in 1741 and again at Churchill in early 1742. Middleton, with his invaluable experience sailing HBC sloops modified for northern service, had been responsible for major design changes to modify the bomb vessel into an exploration ship optimized for polar exploration, which would set the precedent for 104 years of modifications to similar Royal Navy ships. He had also requested the complement of exploration boats for the expedition, including the first RN use of an ice boat. ↩︎
  6. All dates in this post from the period 1741-42 are in the Old Style (Julian), which converts in this period to 11 days later in the Gregorian Calendar. The shift occurred in Great Britain during September 1752. Additionally, ship’s logs from this period have daily entries recorded from noon to noon, such that entries for the morning of any particular day are actually by normal civil time dated the day previously. ↩︎
  7. This narrative of events from late July-August 1742 is drawn from Middleton’s 1741-42 journal of HMS Furnace titled “Master’s Log, kept by Christopher Middleton.” Library and Archives Canada holds a fully-transcribed version of the journal, created from the original handwritten copy that Middleton had sent to Arthur Dobbs in 1742 (one of four known contemporary copies created in 1742 from an original that no longer exists). See Arthur Dobbs fonds, MG18-D-4 Volume 4. The daily entries run from March, 1741 to October, 1742. This typescript transcription was created in 1927 by the Public Archives of Canada (overseas) copyist program from the original in the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland, Belfast, where it can be located at reference D162/37. ↩︎
  8. Map taken from Beckles Willson, The Great Company (New York: Dodd Mead and Co. 1900) P30. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/42279/42279-h/42279-h.htm#im_0172 (accessed 2026-01-09). ↩︎
  9. Master’s Log, Arthur Dobbs fonds LAC, 6 August 1742 entry (which actually is the early hours of 7 August, see note 6). ↩︎
  10. For more information about Middleton’s skilled use of navigational instruments see Jim Bennett; Adventures with instruments: science and seafaring in the precarious career of Christopher Middleton. Notes Rec R Soc Lond 20 September 2019; 73 (3): 303–327.Available online at Research Gate: https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2018.0046. (Accessed 2026-03). ↩︎
  11. This moment has many parallels to James Cook’s expedition along the Pacific coast of North America in May-June 1778, when Cook’s ships laboured along the coast discovering inlets as they trended west along the coast of Alaska, looking for Bering’s Straits to make their northing. See Williams, The British Search… 200. ↩︎
  12. Glyndwr Williams, “MIDDLETON, CHRISTOPHER,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 3, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, accessed February 5, 2026, https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/middleton_christopher_3E.html. ↩︎
  13. The idea of a temperate passage out of Hudson’s Bay towards the Pacific, which Middleton and his rich patron and promoter, Arthur Dobbs, were fixated on, came out of the early explorations of Henry Hudson, Sir Thomas Button (1610-1613) and Luke Foxe (1631). Button had made it up the western coast of the Bay as far as 65° north. The measurement of tidal information was an important factor in the assumptions of a passage in the Bay. Information about the range of tides experienced at different points along the western coast of the Bay was seen to indicate that there was some other outlet to a western sea. This makes more sense when we consider that cartographers had little awareness of the Pacific Coast above California, the true breadth of the North American continental landmass, or the existence of the Rocky Mountains. ↩︎
  14. Other contextual information for this narrative is located in Voyages in Search of a Northwest Passage 1741-1747 Volume 1 The Voyage of Christopher Middleton 1741-1742 Eds. William Barr and Glyndwr Williams (London: Hakluyt Society 1994) P207-210. This excellent publication, with introductory information and explanatory notes by Barr and Williams, is an essential source for contextualizing Middleton’s important contributions to exploration in Hudson’s Bay, and also incorporates Middleton’s letters to the Admiralty and other correspondents, points subsequently used in his defence, and even selections from Lt. John Rankin’s and William Moor’s journals. The portion of Middleton’s journal transcribed in their work runs from 17 July 1741 to 18 August 1742. The editors transcribed the copy of the log found at the National Archives (UK) at ADM 51/379. Barr and Williams have led the efforts to re-evaluate this explorer’s accomplishments, through numerous publications. Williams revisited the events of the Middleton Expedition in several monographs, and in most detail in Voyages of Delusion, cited below. ↩︎
  15. The northwest area of Hudson’s Bay is the traditional land of the Aivilingmiut Inuit. Middleton’s sailing orders are reproduced in Christopher Middleton, A vindication of the conduct of Captain Christopher Middleton, in a late voyage on board His Majesty’s ship the Furnace, for discovering a north-west passage…(London: Middleton and J. Robinson pub. 1743), available at the Internet Archive : https://archive.org/details/avindicationcon00middgoog/mode/2up (accessed 1 Jan. 2026) Pages 61-62. His orders were incredibly vague for the Hudson’s Bay component of his exploration, but become more specific should he have transited a NW Passage, advising him on how to conduct his relations with Pacific Coast indigenous communities, foreign vessels, enemy ships (Spain was at war with Britain, and relations in North America were rapidly deteriorating with France). He also was counselled to link up with Commodore George Anson’s circumnavigation efforts in the Pacific, if possible (a nod to the Admiralty’s love of proposing that separate expeditions “link up” in as-yet totally undiscovered areas of the World). For the initial Bay component of his mission, Middleton was advised to commence his search for the Passage at Whalebone Point, 65° northern latitude, in Roes Welcome Sound, or Luke Foxe’s furthest point in 1631, Ne Ultra, an important point in this post since his missions was only supposed to truly commence ABOVE that degree of latitude, or only about 170 km south of the Arctic Circle latitude. ↩︎
  16. Crews had spent a difficult winter in the Bay at the HBC establishment at Churchill (modern day Manitoba). They had laboriously cut both ships into and then out of secure ice docks in Sloop Cove. Crew members were lodged in the disused former fort/factory structure west of Sloop Cove, while the officers and warrant officers were housed in he recently-completed Prince of Wales Fort. The crew also did not have the type of cold weather gear that later expeditions would benefit from, and several members had frost bite – with the surgeons called upon to amputate toes. The Expedition had lost between 12-14 men, mostly as a result of a widespread outbreak of scurvy that started early in the overwintering and continued to be a feature of the Expedition all the way back to the Thames. See my recent post on these fatalities, where I list them by name. ↩︎
  17. Here, we need only think about the terrible fate of most members of the Jens Munk Expedition, 1619-1620, at this same exact location. The Old Factory had been built on the ruins of Munk’s establishment, where James Knight, in 1717, encountered the century-old skeletons of unburied expedition members. The support of the indigenous community of Cree who gathered near the HBC posts at Churchill and Fort York was especially important to the survival of the Middleton Expedition, as hunters provided significant amounts of fresh meat, mostly by shooting ptarmigans. Journal entries from that winter refer to the thousands of ptarmigans harvested by indigenous peoples. When the Expedition recommenced discovery in 1742, Middleton also took two indigenous guides and an interpreter north with him. One of Arthur Dobbs’ many accusations against Middleton was that he had killed or marooned the indigenous members who helped guide the Expedition north. The journal entry of 14 August 1742 (see above LAC citation) states that the two “Northern Indians” (Denesuline / Chipewyan) wished to return to their communities (as the Expedition readied to return to England) and were provided with a small boat, were taught to sail it, and were provided with goods, toys, and tobacco. ↩︎
  18. Glyn Williams Voyages of Delusion : The quest for the Northwest Passage (London: Yale Univ. Press, 2002) P78. Williams points out that the fort would remain incomplete, and had to be substantially rebuilt by the 1750s. ↩︎
  19. In July 1742, the Expedition had been halted in a very wide opening in the coast which offered similar hopes to the crew of being a passage west, as they waited for the Sound to clear of ic. This was Wager Bay (also known as Ukkusiksalik Bay). Repulse Bay is well known to those interested in the lost 1845 Sir John Franklin Expedition, as the location where, more than a century later, Dr. John Rae of the HBC launched two of his northern expeditions. In 1846 Rae landed at the mouth of a river at the NW extremity of the Bay, and constructed Fort Hope, whose latitude he fixed precisely at 66°32’16” N. At this location, given the Arctic Circle’s estimated location in 1846, Rae would have walked over the Circle latitude every time he went north to check on his boat North Pole, or to fish or to hunt at North Pole Lake or the nearby Christie Lake! Rae’s journal entries can be accessed at https://archive.org/details/cihm_39502/page/n78/mode/2up?q=circle P22.8 ↩︎
  20. Arthur Dobbs fonds, LAC, 8 August 1742 entry. Middleton went ashore with the ship’s carpenter, gunner, the clerk John Wigate, and an indigenous guide. ↩︎
  21. Middleton, A vindication of the conduct... P.37. Image is taken from the digitized Oxford University copy available at archive.org. ↩︎
  22. The expedition had departed England on 8 June 1741 and overwintered near Churchill, present-day Manitoba. Middleton was surprised at the early appearance of scurvy, which had not been seen on his many HBC sailings. Relations with the HBC establishment had become fraught over the course of the long winter. Middleton could not risk returning to Churchill, or being beset in ice later in 1742. As the journal shows, he held several different councils of his officers and warrant officers to arrive at major decisions, including the overwintering at Churchill, the modifications to the ships in early 1742, and also this decision to return to England. ↩︎
  23. As related in Barr and Williams’ edited Hakluyt Society publication, Middleton had been incredibly close to helping to resolve a remarkable mystery that he had a personal interest in: The fate of the 1719 James Knight HBC Expedition to find a Northwest Passage. Middleton had an early interest in searching for Knight’s lost ships Albany and Discovery, and missing crews, and had been frustrated when, despite being at Churchill in 1722, he was denied a place to go with the Captain John Scroggs Expedition as a cartographer. Scroggs found wreckage along the coasts of “Brook Cobham Island” (Middleton’s later name for this was Marble Island) and the mainland. Scroggs assumed the ships had wrecked on the mainland. The whereabouts of the wrecks and Knight’s actual island settlement remained a mystery until HBC Explorer Samuel Hearne went north with whaling ships in 1767 and 1769, and spoke to Inuit, who related elders’ oral testimony about men overwintering on Marble Island. Hearne spotted wreckage in the depths of the bay at the western end of the Island. Back in 1742 shore parties from (Moor’s own ship) Discovery had actually encountered artifacts of the Knight Expedition. They seem to have recognized what expedition these came from, and may have actually seen the wrecks as they surveyed tides and depths. This incredible information seems not to have been reported back to Middleton and does not appear in his own journal entries from that period. (Barr and Williams note P.214-215.) ↩︎
  24. I compared the latitude and longitude entries in Middleton’s daily logs with notable landmarks’ positions based on Google Earth imagery. Despite methodical, almost obsessive efforts to record accurate positions, all while using the best instruments the era could offer, Middleton was consistently off. Parry later ascribed Middleton’s positional discrepancies to the inaccuracies of even the most accurate mid-eighteenth century quadrants and time pieces, added to the issues with compass reading so close to the Magnetic North Pole. By Middleton’s own positional calculations, he would have crossed the Arctic Circle before rounding Cape Hope, while navigating north from Wager Bay. His longitude calculations also had a consistent error, but he was able to correct for this upon his return to England. The Royal Navy’s program to develop an accurate device for measuring longitude is too complex to discuss here, but John Harrison’s work for the Board of Longitude was occurring during the period, and it would await the John Arnold timekeeping pieces for truly accurate longitude calculations on sea journeys. The 1770s expeditions of Captains James Cook and Constantine Phipps both benefitted from this newly-developed technology, and advances in the prevention of the disease of scurvy. Middleton had one timekeeping device that he trusted, which stayed on his person through the cold winter of 1741-42 even as he slept. ↩︎
  25. Barr and Williams reproduce Middleton’s paper, see pages 229-233. ↩︎
  26. Bennett; “Adventures with instruments…” 303-304. Middleton received the Royal Society’s Copley Medal for communicating his rigorous scientific observations about navigation in Hudson’s Bay to the Society on his return. This article notes Middleton’s early years in the privateering trade and then as an HBC mate and captain from 1721, his long interest in scientific observations to aid in navigation, and his enthusiastic adoption of new instruments. After delivering a series of papers, supported by observations from his yearly HBC trips, he had been elected as Fellow to the Royal Society in 1737. Middleton’s interest in magnetic variation of the compass prefigures many of Parry’s later observations on the difficulty of navigating in the high latitudes or near the Magnetic North Pole. Middleton corresponded with Edmond Halley and his work was influential to another RS Fellow and Captain: James Cook. ↩︎
  27. Middleton and Dobbs had exchanged a lively correspondence through the 1730s. Middleton had wholeheartedly believed there could indeed be a passage to the west somewhere in the unexplored northwestern reaches of the Bay, from the 1720s right up until he sailed into Repulse Bay. As the correspondence reproduced by Barr and Williams shows, Dobbs believed that the HBC monopoly needed to be broken in the Bay, and that the Company had colluded to hide information about the Passage, and frustrated attempts to explore the northwestern reaches for this. The letters were quite private as Middleton was still in the employ of the HBC, but discussing efforts to secure an independent expedition. He provided Dobbs with direct access to Company records, including previous ship’s logs and exploration journals (which had not been made available to anyone outside the HBC). A short account of Dobbs’ campaigns can be found at Eamonn McKee’s blog “Matonabbee and Mr Dobbs: How an Irishman Accidentally Helped Create Canada” (accessed 2026-01-15). The same disillusionment with the imaginings of armchair geographers back in Britain – once explorers had laboriously “ground-faulted” their observations through rigorous surveying work – can be discerned in many other eighteenth century explorations, including the search for a southern continent, charting Pacific/Alaskan coasts, and the existence of a Hyperborean or “open polar” temperate sea at the top of the World. This last myth hampered James Cook’s surveying of the Northern Coast of Alaska in 1778, when a decision was made not to strengthen either of his ships for polar service. See Williams, The British Search, P203-205. ↩︎
  28. Dobbs’ campaign against the HBC about their supposed lack of Northwest Passage exploration, and then his work trying to overturn their exclusive charter to trade in the Bay, is considered in most detail in E.E. Rich’s Hudson’s Bay Company, 1670-1870 Vol. 1 1670-1763 (London: The Hudson’s Bay Record Society, 1958) see Chapter 40, P556-586. ↩︎
  29. Expedition Clerk John Wigate had been part of Middleton’s small shore party that had actually climbed White Island’s heights to lay eyes on the Frozen Strait. Wigate sat in on the councils of the expedition, and had charge of Middleton’s expedition journal after their return (copying it). After falling out with Middleton he lent his name to the production of a map of 1746 that translated Dobbs’ absurd claims onto the page – showing Southampton Island continuing north to connect to land, showing Wager Bay continuing towards the distant west, and introducing more uncertainty into other areas of the NW Coast of the Bay (see LAC catalogue entry of the Wigate map dedicated to Dobbs). ↩︎
  30. See Middleton, Vindication, cited above. ↩︎
  31. See Williams Arctic Labyrinth, P105-106. His crew’s demonstration of loyalty is revealing here, because, unlike Dobbs, Middleton was in no position to help these witnesses, either by patronage or bribery. He had described his crew as a bunch of “wretches” in an Admiralty report upon his return. This assessment of these regular seaman, some impressed, many sick – who had stuck with him through a terrible winter – and then came to his defence – is disappointing. ↩︎
  32. It is difficult not to be sympathetic to Middleton’s plight. He had helped Dobbs acquire access to records of previous HBC expeditions in the Bay, and had even named geographic features after his erstwhile friend and the several comrades who would come to desert him. He had actively consulted these senior expedition members on key decisions in a series of councils onboard Furnace during the Expedition. ↩︎
  33. Williams, Arctic Labyrinth. P108. ↩︎
  34. The detail of the Middleton Expedition being at the Arctic circle certainly doesn’t come up in any of the sources I have read, or in information online. ↩︎
  35. More about the interesting early history of Naujaat/Repulse Bay, including Middleton’s exploration, John Rae’s camp, and the area’s later importance to whaling, can be found at : https://www.repulsebay.ca/history.html ↩︎
  36. Haviland Bay was named by Parry on 22 August 1821 after the Reverend James Haviland of Bath. See Parry, Sir W.E. Journal of a second voyage for the discovery of a northwest passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific; (London: J. Murray, 1824) P57 (22 August entry), available at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/journalofsecondv00parr/page/36/mode/1up ↩︎
  37. The map that shows the systematic sounding of Repulse Bay by Middleton’s crew is reproduced as Plate VIII in Barr and Williams’ above cited publication, P180-181, and originates from the collection of the (UK) Ministry of Defence Library, Whitehall. ↩︎
  38. Middleton, Vindication, Letter from Middleton to Dobbs 27 Nov. 1742 (P76-78). This letter, where Middleton was attempting to caution Arthur Dobbs away from any continued belief in a Hudson’s Bay Passage – at least in the waters he had sailed through – was one of the main prompts for Dobbs to initiate his campaign of attacks against Middleton. ↩︎
  39. Ben Panko “This Wandering Concrete Sphere Will Track the Movements of the Arctic Circle” Smithsonian Magazine 4 Oct. 2017: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-giant-concrete-sphere-will-move-50-feet-each-year-180965095/(accessed 29 Dec. 2025) The same phenomenon has resulted in Iceland’s northern coast no longer being located above the Arctic Circle. Only the small island of Grimsey still cuts the line.  ↩︎
  40. See https://www.phpsciencelabs.com/obliquity-of-the-ecliptic-calculator/index.php (accessed 2026-01-26). Be sure to enter the dates in the Julian Calendar setting (Julian Calendar 1742-08-06), based on J. Laskar‘s algorithm in Astronomy and Astrophysics, Vol 157, p68 (1986), New Formulas for the Precession, Valid Over 10000 years, Table 8. ↩︎
  41. For another example of a map showing the controversial Wager Straits see Boston Rare Maps auction: https://bostonraremaps.com/inventory/bowen-correct-draught-of-the-north-pole-1748/#:~:text=In%201746%2C%20Dobbs%20mounted%20a,his%20sources%20at%20lower%20left. (accessed 2025-12-27) ↩︎
  42. On the topic of bribery, Moor, Thompson, and Wigate all benefitted from deserting Middleton. As a strange coincidence, Middleton reportedly escorted Moor and this next expedition out of home waters in the ship he had finally secured the command of, HMS Shark. See Willson, The Great Company. P264. ↩︎
  43. A major accomplishment of the Moor Expedition was the charting of Chesterfield Inlet, which had been missed by Middleton and earlier expeditions, mainly because of ice conditions and outlying islands which help mask the entrance. Moor’s expedition did not get up to the higher reaches of Roes Welcome Sound. Moor and Francis Smith – commanding California – had a difficult overwintering at York Factory, where James Isham (who had been factor at Churchill while Middleton wintered there) was once again made to host “bothersome guests.” Relations between the captains deteriorated to the extent that Isham had to act as a go-between and the captains avoided working in concert for the explorations of the next season. ↩︎
  44. Glyndwr Williams, “MIDDLETON, CHRISTOPHER,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 3, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, accessed April 4, 2026, https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/middleton_christopher_3E.html. ↩︎
  45. See Williams, The British Search for the Northwest Passage….P 260-268. ↩︎
  46. John Barrow, A chronological history of voyages into the Arctic regions; undertaken chiefly for the purpose of discovering a north-east, north-west, or polar passage between the Atlantic and Pacific (London: J. Murray, 1818) 364. Available at Internet Archive. ↩︎
  47. Ibid, 278-286. Barrow wrote “Here Middleton talks very unintelligibly of a frozen strait to the eastward of them.”(283) This is exactly what Parry navigated through less than three years later! ↩︎
  48. Parry had improved on Middleton’s overwintering of 1741-42 by being the first Royal Navy explorer to overwinter north of the Arctic Circle, at Melville Island, 1819-1820. ↩︎
  49. Parry, Sir W.E. Journal of a second voyage… P35-36. See 18-22 August 1821 entries. Parry dispatched Lt. Palmer to examine the NW coast of the Bay, and this party landed very near where Rae would later set up camp. The latitude at this spot was measured at precisely 66°30’58”. ↩︎

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Author: Warsearcher

Ballistic Research Missile of Truthiness (BRMT)

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